The Internet has emerged as a critical communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of important scientific, business and consumer applications. The Internet has become ubiquitous and has enabled businesses to expand globally. For example, customer service organizations are often scattered globally, where these customer service organizations are organized and/or tasked with addressing customer requests that are based on the type of customer requests instead of the customers' physical location. When a customer calls and uses natural language, an automated system makes the determination on which representative or department is best able to respond to the request based on historical probability data and routes the call accordingly.
The automated system uses a call classifier to determine where a particular call should be forwarded. The classifier uses predictions made about the distribution of the calls based on historical data. The predicted probabilities for each category of calls are fed to the classifier and updated occasionally. The classifier is constrained by the probabilities it is provided for each category of calls.
When a dynamic event occurs, the distribution of the type of requests by the callers' changes but the classifier remains constrained by the previous probabilities for each category and results in a decline of the accuracy of the classifier. The calls are increasingly misrouted and require intervention to reach the proper destination, which increases the operating cost for the customer service organizations with a possible corresponding increase in customer dissatisfaction.
For example, when a natural disaster such as a hurricane occurs, the distribution of calls to an insurance company changes. Relative to more stable caller requests, the percentages of calls for new claims, questions on coverage and similar inquiries will likely increase. The classifier probabilities established based on a regular business day are not applicable and more and more of the calls may be misrouted. Hence, the automated system becomes less responsive to the customer's need during a particularly difficult time.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for reassignment of classifier probabilities based on dynamic events.